Over the past 20 years, empowerment has been used as a 'rallying cry' for girls' education and a necessary condition for gender equality. This article explores gender as an organising framework for international education policy and development during the Global Goals era (2000-2020). Using feminist policy discourse analysis as a coordinated conceptual and methodological approach, I show how gender organises the policy discourses by constructing target populations and constraining policy parameters. The data used in this article are sourced from policy documents published by UN Women and UNGEI from 2000-2020, and from semi-structured interview conversations with girls' education policy workers during the MDG-SDG transition. The findings presented in this article show how dominant policy discourses are constructed over time, and how they evolve to reflect changing cultural expectations for education's role in development.